Webshots Cofounders Buy Back Site For $80 Million Discount

from the not-bad dept

So, here was the trick to making money in the dot com era and ending up running a cool company you like: (1) start a company doing something cool that you liked (2) sell that company for gobs (and gobs) of money to some idiot company with too much stock wealth (3) wait for that big company to fail and (4) buy back your old company for pennies on the dollar - keeping most of the money you made, plus getting the company back. Such a deal seems to have worked wonders for Webshots. In 1999 they sold the company to Excite for $84 million. Today they paid $2.4 million (in cash) to buy it back.

Reader Comments

Oh that story was beautiful

Frankly that was beautiful. The most wonderful dot com story i've ever heard. I'm laughing as i write this. It's nice to to know that even now companies are still being screwed by the dot com era. And what's so great is that the original owners got their company back to boot. Fantastic!Way to go!